Abstract

Because they demonstrate a self-reflexivity which is expected only from emancipated beings, the Afro-American Slave narratives present a problematic not only for the field of Western literary history, but also for the fields of epistemology and anthropology as they have been construed since Immanuel Kant. While this holds for English language slave narratives in general, it is particularly the case for those composed in Arabic, which have been as marginal to the emergent Afro-American literary canon as they have been to the dominant "Western" canon. Arabic language Slave narratives present a particular problem of reading not only because they are linguistically other, but also because they function as a historical sign of the intersection of Western, African, Islamic, and marginal discourses; a sign which immediately poses problematics of both historical inscription and reference. This study investigates those problematics as constituting limits which subvert modernity's claim of universal comprehensiveness: in particular, the Enlightenment's claim that emancipation is gained through the hegemony of Reason, and the Romantics' claim that it is achieved through the balance of Reason and Imagination. The focus of this investigation is a specific Arabic slave narrative, the "Diary of Ben Ali," written sometime between 1800 and 1859. ;After reviewing the institutional history of reading slave narratives in the United States, giving emphasis to the literary theories of Robert Burns Stepto, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Houston Baker Jr., the study takes Gates's notion of slave narratives as a response to Kant as an occasion for delineating the epistemological and rhetorical stakes involved in modernity's concept of "The Negro." The discussion of the Kantian concept of "The Negro" enables a consideration of the ways in which Arabic language slave narratives challenge and subvert that concept. The result of that consideration is the description of "Ben Ali's Diary" as being exemplary of Arabic language slave narratives' rhetorical subversion of modernity. "Ben Ali's Diary" is exemplary of that subversion because of how it presents an aporia for representation-based generic readings, and forces a reevaluation of rhetoric that both invokes and problematizes Aristotle's categorical analysis of discourse